2011-05-16

Conflict Space

I was debating with an anti-2003-Iraq-war American today, and it served to highlight the tribal instincts. They divided the world into nation states and couldn't conceive that America could attack someone who wasn't directly threatening them.

Whereas people like me divide the world into humanists, non-humanists and anti-non-humanists (otherwise known as "neutral", "bad" and "good" respectively) - a grouping that includes members of every nation in all categories. And we view nation states as a forced grouping by geography. And the important thing is the ideology of the person who rises to the top in that geographical region, because if it's an anti-non-humanist who gets into power, the resources of the nation state get to be used to topple non-humanists.

In answer to befuddled insurgents who look at US military rule and see "dictatorship" while I see "freedom", there is a sub-category of anti-non-humanism called anti-subjugation. Instead of fighting dictatorship, which the US military technically was, instead of fighting occupation, which the US certainly was, instead of fighting power - and the US military is certainly the most powerful - the goal was to fight subjugation - which wasn't occurring.

It was not possible for me to isolate this desire to fight subjugation - not power, occupation or dictatorship - without the Iraq war. As I needed to live those brief months where the US had a military occupation to see how the Iraqis reacted to that.

It was with that that I also had the terminology to explain to Russians what was causing the free nations of NATO to naturally band together (as non-subjugators and anti-subjugators) without needing to be forced to do so. This was something innate/organic in the nature of these groupings/nation states/democracies.